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Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, Episode 1: The Mystery Broom

Host: John Cullen

JOHN CULLEN: Content warning. The following podcast contains mentions of brooms and graphic depictions of curling.

JOHN CULLEN: It's Thursday, September 10th, 2015, and my phone is blowing up. My friends are all texting me. John, are you seeing what's happening right now? They tell me it's an emergency and I have to turn on the TV.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: It is the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling on Sportsnet, and they are fired up for the first event of 2015 2016. It's the Tour Challenge in Paradise, Newfoundland and Labrador.

JOHN CULLEN: Walking on to the ice is a man named Brad Gushue. Ask most anyone in Canada to name a curler, and whether you're into the game or not, they'll have heard of Brad. If Brad isn't the Michael Jordan of curling, he might be the LeBron James, the best curler of this generation and someone who is innovating the sport on and off the ice.

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ANNOUNCER: The 12 time Newfoundland men's champion, three time Grand Slam champion, 2006 Olympic gold medalist from St. John’s, Newfoundland, team Gushue.

[cheers]

JOHN CULLEN: The texts from my friends who are elite curlers and broadcasters from around the world are telling me that Brad is trying something that no one has ever seen before. They can't figure out what the hell is going on. And once I turn the TV on, neither can I.

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ANNOUNCER: I'm sensing there's a favourite in the house. Maybe, maybe not.

JOHN CULLEN: All curling teams consist of four players. The skip is in charge of the strategy for the team. The team's boss, Brad Gushue, is the skip of his team. And like lots of bosses, he does an awful lot of yelling.

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[Brad yelling]

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: As Brad Gushue is yelling hurry, now, they're using a theory or trying out a theory of where what sweeper should sweep and on what kind of side of the sliding surface.

JOHN CULLEN: What Gushue is doing is he is using just one sweeper. One sweeper. This approach, that's what my friends were blowing up my phone about. Curling teams always use two sweepers. But during this game, there's only one, and we didn't know why.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So they were trying to hold that rock straighter by having one sweeper on the outside sweeping hard and the other one not.

JOHN CULLEN: What I'm seeing is Brad's team-mate Brad Gallant sweeping the rock up the ice and him alone. The other team was looking on in confusion and so was I. Sitting at home on the couch, I thought to myself, what possible benefit could this have? It looked really strange. While Brad madly swept in front of the rock as it travelled down the ice, his sweeping partner, who would normally be brushing along with him, was just kind of walking beside the rock doing nothing. Like he had just given up.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: What do you think of that, Kev?

KEVIN MARTIN: Well, I think the inside sweeper certainly should be on the inside of the curl of the rock.

JOHN CULLEN: 2010 Olympic gold medalist Kevin Martin was in the broadcast booth that day.

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KEVIN MARTIN: To not have the other person out front cleaning in a frosty situation doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think, but we'll see how it goes as the game progresses. But it may be a theory that maybe… Sure. Sure.

JOHN CULLEN: But Kevin was wrong. Within weeks, every competitive curling team on the planet would switch to using one sweeper. It wasn't because they were lazy. It wasn't because the rocks or the ice changed. It was because of one thing and one thing only: a broom, a new superb room made of a mysterious material never used before. And that broom, combined with the one sweeper technique, would lead to the biggest scandal in curling history. This is Broomgate, the story of how a broom almost killed curling.

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JOHN CULLEN: When I say the word broomgate, What does that mean to you?

FIRST SPEAKER: That's when that tight knit fabric amongst the top competitive teams started to be ripped apart.

SECOND SPEAKER: I think some friendships were ended.

THIRD SPEAKER: This is, this is a mess.

FOURTH SPEAKER: Very stressful. A lot of sleepless nights.

FIFTH SPEAKER: It felt super personal because it was being called a cheater.

SIXTH SPEAKER: When you’re first one out the door, you're going to get bloodied. People are going to come after you. Like it was just toxic. It was so toxic.

SEVENTH SPEAKER: A very stressful, traumatic curling season. My least fun curling season of my entire career. It was the… It was a year I'd like to forget.

JOHN CULLEN: While some people might have wanted to forget about Broomgate, there was no way. Not once the controversy hit late night TV.

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HOST: This is one sports controversy you can't just sweep under the rug. I bristle at the idea. I try to brush off the allegations all you want, but this sort of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

[laughter]

JOHN CULLEN: It took just two months for this scandal to move beyond the world of curling. By November of 2015, The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post had picked up on the story. Stephen Colbert did a full six minute segment on it.

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STEPHEN COLBERT: Point is I'm a curling purist. As far as I'm concerned, it's all gone downhill ever since they started playing indoors. I prefer the original 16th century Scottish rules. Just a group of guys on a frozen pond hurling flat bottomed river stones and probably falling through the ice. Whoever doesn't die wins. Now, that's a sport.

[laughter]

JOHN CULLEN: My name is John Cullen. If you're the kind of curling sicko who knows who finished second at the 2015 British Columbia Curling Championships, well, then you might have heard of me. I was what's commonly referred to as a tier two curler. My team won a handful of World Curling Tour events, a modest amount of cash, and peaked at number 30 in the world. I have seven provincial medals to my name, and none of them are gold. I started curling when I was 12. I'd always been intrigued by seeing it on TV. And when my grade seven teacher took our class to a curling rink one day, I loved it. The physicality of the sport appealed to me as a lifelong hockey player, and the strategic aspect of the sport appealed to me as a lifelong nerd. Soon enough, curling became my main thing. In high school, I practiced so much that the ice maker of my local curling club gave me a set of keys. As an adult, I spent all my time off of work going to curling tournaments. Look, my email address was cullenthecurler@hotmail.com. For 20 years, the sport was my life and I loved every minute of it. Well, except for one year. It was 2015, the year of Broomgate. It was a complete disaster. All my friends were fighting with each other. People were screaming at me online. What had been previously described as a gentleman's game was anything but. And now, eight years later, no one talks about it. The full story has never been told, so I'm going to tell it. I love curling. I always have. I don't want this to happen again. So maybe if we talk about it, it won't.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Curling, like love, is a disease of the mind. One needs a cardigan, a comfortable cap, rubbers, a broom and stones. Stones? A broom?

JOHN CULLEN: If you're just catching up, yeah, a broom. It's the most important piece of equipment in curling.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Fundamentals of a good curling delivery: don't change the position of the head, shoulders or body, except to elevate them by straightening the knees.

JOHN CULLEN: This sweet, very Canadian film from 1963 shows us one fundamental thing about curling. Very little has changed. Curling is actually considered to be one of the oldest team sports known to man. A stone was found in Scotland with the date 1511 inscribed on it.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Oh, sure. Keep your foot in the hack. Use it to push off.

JOHN CULLEN: The basic rules haven't changed in hundreds of years. The key is to have more stones stay in the bullseye known as the house at the end of the game than your opponents. To do that, every member of the team gets their turn at being the shooter and moving the rock down the ice. But once that rock is let go, it's in the sweeper’s hands to make it perfect.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Slide the stone easily. Let the weight of the stone work for you. Keep your eye on the broom. I've got it. Easy now.

JOHN CULLEN: For most of my career, I was considered a pretty good sweeper. And for nearly a decade, Jay Wakefield was my sweeping partner.

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JAY WAKEFIELD: I'm an introverted person, so like having less people to interact with was always a better thing for me.

JOHN CULLEN: I wanted to talk to Jay about the ripple effect of the one sweeper technique and our years sweeping together.

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JAY WAKEFIELD: I've always just played with my best friends. I've never… I've only had a handful of teams where, you know, maybe me and another guy in the team didn't really get along. So.

JOHN CULLEN: But to be clear, I wasn't one of the guys you didn't like.

JAY WAKEFIELD: You were not. No. It's hard to go 10 years playing with the same guy if you don't like, if you don't like them.

JOHN CULLEN: This is very true, and it's especially true when it comes to me and Jay.

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JAY WAKEFIELD: So obviously, not just do you spend a lot of time together, but you spend a lot of time on the ice together. You spend every shot in each other's face, talking to each other. It's just a lot of constant communication.

JOHN CULLEN: My wife once told Jay that when she watches us sweep together, it looks like we're kissing.

SOUNDCLIP

JOHN CULLEN: Maybe we… maybe subconsciously, we wanted to.

JAY WAKEFIELD: Yeah, maybe.

JOHN CULLEN: Who knows? But.

JOHN CULLEN: What do you remember about the switch to one sweeper?

JAY WAKEFIELD: I remember I was out doing something, I can't remember what, and my phone started to blow up with all my curling friends being like, you watching this? So I got home and I looked and I’m like, what the hell's going on here? And it was all this kind of chaos, for lack of a better word. We had absolutely no idea, really, what the one sweeper thing was all about and like how to actually try to make it do what they were doing.

JOHN CULLEN: It took us a while to catch up, but like every other competitive team at the time, we made the switch.

SOUNDCLIP

JOHN CULLEN: Do you think curling like lost something a little bit when all of a sudden, only one guy is now sweeping at a time? Was some of that art kind of lost?

JAY WAKEFIELD: Yeah, I think it did. I think at the time, being a competitive sweeper, I felt like my job was less sacred, I guess. Like some of the art was gone and some of the skill was gone, because all of a sudden, I could just like do whatever with the broom and make the shot great.

JOHN CULLEN: I feel that way too. It wasn't like the one sweeper method took away all the skill I had developed over two decades. Jay and I were still a team within a team, but sweeping had become less of a sacred bond between two team-mates. And as I make my way through this story, I do feel a sense of loss. I think a lot of us did. But it wasn't just the one sweeper technique that made us feel like something had shifted. The reason we were all sweeping differently was because of a broom. Over time, curling brooms have evolved. Originally, they were like the brooms you'd find in your house or with a witch's costume, made of corn or straw and mostly meant to remove debris from the ice. As technology improved, they moved from corn to hair to what we use today, something that looks like a Swiffer but with a specialized fabric head. Over the last two decades, broom manufacturers have experimented with different fabrics with varying results. But no one started paying attention to broom technology until two brothers, Archie and Harach Manavian, came along with a broom head that would change the game forever.

SOUNDCLIP

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Who's the older brother?

HARACH MANAVIAN: Archie. I'm the little. I'm 10 years younger. Even though I look 10 years older, I'm 10 years younger. That's what happens when you work with him, you know?

JOHN CULLEN: My producer, Kathleen Goldhar, and I meet Archie and Harach Manavian at the headquarters of Hardline, one of the world's largest curling broom manufacturers. It's tucked away in a suburb of Montreal, not far from the airport. Hardline's office belies their status as one of curling’s big dogs. It's in a one story building in the corner of an industrial park. This is decidedly not the Nike World headquarters. Archie and Harach sit together behind one desk. It's cluttered with invoices, loose sticky notes and office equipment. Behind the brothers, the wall is covered from top to bottom with team photos, men and women holding their brooms, wearing t-shirts with Hardline emblazoned on them, and medals around their necks or holding up trophies. There's no pretence with the brothers. They're kind of rough, speak their minds, could even be intimidating on initial meeting. But their warmth is contagious, and the love they have for each other is very close to the surface.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: I don't know if I'd call myself a bully, but…

JOHN CULLEN: This is Archie.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: Let's just say he grew up not taking my shit.

HARACH MANAVIAN: He was a very good older brother. He showed me life, you know, showed me the ropes, and he was always there, always had my back in a lot of ways. And, you know, I'm very grateful to have an older brother like that. He basically, you know, took care of me. I mean, we both lost our dads when I was really young. So he was the guy that made sure that I was on the right path.

JOHN CULLEN: Harach was 16, Archie 26, when their dad died in a car accident while on vacation in Armenia.

SOUNDCLIP

HARACH MANAVIAN: I was 16. I remember I was in secondary four, which is what, 10th grade. I had final exams two weeks later after that, and my brother was young too. So he was 26, and he had to go there and, you know, bring him back. Our mother was in the same car accident, so we had to take care of her too at the same time. So we grew up pretty fast. It's life. It happens.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You guys aren't professional curlers, right? How did you find your way to Hardline?

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: Only in our heads we’re professional. We're professional armchair curlers, basically, is what we are. A friend of mine that I played ball with begged me for 10 years to go try it out. And I used to tell him, you know, come on, man, it's for old people. And I used to brush him off all the time. And this one year, I caved. I said, you know what? Just to shut you up, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to try it and then leave me alone. And he said, no problem. And I walked in the door, fell in love with the game, and the rest is history.

JOHN CULLEN: But before he discovered curling, Archie's life was all over the place.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: I was on the path to become a ski bum, actually. I was living in Whistler and just enjoying life and came back. And my father used to own a small business, and worked with him for a bit and didn't like that. Then I went to work for a friend of mine at a food company and didn't really like that too much. And I'm the kind of guy that needs to be outside. I can't be indoors.

JOHN CULLEN: So Archie found a job that took him outside.

SOUNDCLIP

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: I was a, what do you call it? A, an information distribution engineer.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What the fuck does that mean?

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: I was a mailman. I was a mailman for the Postal service, and I loved my job. It was a great job. It was starting to wear on me, but it was never a fact of I have to find something else.

JOHN CULLEN: Their mother wasn't too excited about the way Archie's life was going, and so she put pressure on Harach to make something of himself.

SOUNDCLIP

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: She put her foot down with Harach and made him hit the books. And he actually made something of himself by getting an MBA, going to work on Wall Street for 15 years, and he took on the big boys and won.

JOHN CULLEN: So before Hardline was born, Archie the mailman was just a local curler who loved to hang with his buddies after work and play a few games, then shoot the shit over a beer. And Harach was working on Wall Street. The inspiration for Hardline came to Archie in 2009, when he was at a bonspiel, a fancy name for a curling tournament in Charlevoix, Quebec.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: There's a bonspiel that everyone should attend once in their lifetime about an hour and a half outside Quebec City.

JOHN CULLEN: At the bonspiel, a curling legend named Randy Ferbey and his team caught Archie's eye.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: They had these custom brooms, and our eyes were popping out of our heads. We got the brilliant idea of coming out with custom brooms at the time. And we were on a high all weekend, and…

JOHN CULLEN: Archie would return home from Charlevoix just buzzing, which is funny because the broom he's talking about doesn't have anything to do with performance, but rather just a custom paint job done on an existing broom. And he wasn't even imagining starting a custom curling broom empire. He was just excited about the idea of making a bunch of brooms for his team, but he very quickly hit a snag.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: The airbrush artist told me it was going to be roughly $100 a broom.

JOHN CULLEN: So that would be too expensive.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: I was on a bit of a downer for a week or two, and I met a friend of mine and he says, you know, you look a little bit down. And I told him the entire story and he said, well, what are these brooms made of? And I said, well, of carbon fibre. And he tells me he's got a friend in the carbon fibre business. You know, why don't you give him a call?

JOHN CULLEN: The good news was that this guy could make the brooms for cheaper. The bad news was that he'd have to make a bulk order. So he called one of his curling buddies, Stan Fong, with a proposal.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: Listen, we should really try this out. You know, we'll make a few hundred brooms, and if they sell, they sell. And if they don't, well, it is what it is. And so we basically got, I think at that time, it was seven guys to pitch in $500. And Hardline was born.

JOHN CULLEN: Archie had unintentionally launched a curling broom company. But so far, all he had were broom handles. A broom is nothing without its head. When it comes to curling, the head is crazy important. It's what helps to control the rock as it travels down the ice. Sweeping reduces the friction between the rock and the ice, allowing it to travel further and straighter. While curling had evolved to synthetic fabric broom heads, there were always issues with the fabric wearing down. And with the repeated use and the gathering of frost on the head, a lot of brooms weren't nearly as effective as they could have been. So Archie started to shop around for the best head he could find to put on his carbon fibre handles. He could have just licensed a broom head from an existing manufacturer, but that's not the Archie way.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: At that time, we were getting handed lots of heads to try out, saying that it was the best head on the market. And I had told them that, you know what, I'm going to try it and give you a review on it. And basically, they weren't really that good.

JOHN CULLEN: Archie kept turning down broom heads presented to him. That's until he met with a mysterious inventor who showed Archie something a little bit different.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: The ice pad was basically put into my hands and they said, like you got to try this. So I tried it. The ease of sweeping of the ice pad and the fact that the fabric, you could clean it, whereas the other pads on the market, once they got dirty, you have to change them because they're useless. I said, this is going to be like really, really good. And I said, well, listen, if you were to give me worldwide exclusivity on selling this, I think we can make this work. And he said, sure. And that's how it all started.

JOHN CULLEN: Archie named his new head the ice pad, a new broom head made of an unidentified fabric by an unidentified inventor.

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KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Who handed you the ice pad?

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: Well, the inventor.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Who's that?

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: The inventor.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Why won't you tell us who that is?

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: It’s irrelevant.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: No, I think it's not. I don't understand why we want to keep his name secret.

HARACH MANAVIAN: Well, why do you want to know the name?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because he invented this great thing. I want to talk to him about what he invented and what he made.

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: Well, you can look it up.

JOHN CULLEN: We did look it up. We couldn't find the inventor. As you might imagine, information on inventors who specialize in finding the best possible fabric for a curling broom is not so readily available. But what we do know is that this broom material is incredibly versatile, strong and waterproof. It makes sweeping feel easy, a little too easy. So easy that you only need one sweeper. This now brings us back to the 2015 16 season, me sitting on the couch with my phone going crazy watching that grand slam in Newfoundland where Brad Gushue and his team stepped out onto the ice and changed the game forever. But it wasn't just the one sweeper technique they were showing off for the first time. It was the powerful magic of Hardline’s broom.

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BRAD GUSHUE: All you got to do is put the broom in front of the rock, and the rock starts going whatever direction you want.

JOHN CULLEN: Brad Gushue.

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BRAD GUSHUE: If everybody can't figure it out, really, it’s… But we're not going to tell everybody, but we're going to show you. We're going to show you the impact that it… that these could have.

JOHN CULLEN: The broom could take the rock in, quote, whatever direction you want. And Hardline sponsored players had been using the broom for a couple of years now. And the curling community started to wonder, was it giving them an unfair advantage?

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The problem is there's a whole lack of trust now among the players. There was a great camaraderie among the players out here on the tour, and it's a big divisor now. And that's kind of sad for the sport, to be frank.

JOHN CULLEN: Quickly, suspicions around this broom started to tear at the very fabric of my community.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST SPEAKER: You know, the problems between the teams that, you know, guys who were friends, recently, they're not talking to each other.

SECOND SPEAKER: Is this sport becoming cutthroat? Is money changing the sport?

JOHN CULLEN: But here's the thing. There's something I haven't told you. Years before Brad showed the world what this broom could do, I was one of the first curlers to use a Hardline broom. And I loved it. I told all my curling friends about it. And so when Hardline wanted some star power, I convinced one of my friends who just so happened to be one of the best curlers in the world to use the broom. And little did I know what would happen next. Call it what you want. Call it the butterfly effect. Call me patient zero, the first domino, but I'm here to tell you I might have caused Broomgate.

JOHN CULLEN: This season on Broomgate.

SOUNDCLIP

JOHN CULLEN: Was there ever a thought in your mind that they were cheating?

FIRST UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The thought crossed our mind where they were aware of this and they hid it.

SECOND UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: This type of technology is going to ruin the sport.

JOHN CULLEN: so why do it?

SECOND UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Because we want the technology race to stop.

THIRD UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It was awful. It was so unpleasant to be at curling events, which is usually, I just said it's my favourite part of the game.

FOURTH UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Because this is these brooms. This is what we're dealing with.

FIFTH UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You can manipulate this rock thing on a joystick. We felt like we were bringing a knife to a gunfight.

ARCHIE MANAVIAN: And that's when I said, these guys want a war. I'm going to give them a war they're never going to forget.

JOHN CULLEN: Broomgate is a production of USG Audio and CBC, in association with Pacific Electric and Kelly & Kelly, hosted by me, John Cullen, and concept devised by John Cullen and Kelly & Kelly. Showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar. Executive producers are Josh Bloch from USG Audio, Mike Falbo, Ed Helms and Brett Harris from Pacific Electric, Chris Kelly, Lauren Berkovich and Pat Kelly from Kelly & Kelly, Chris Oke and Cesil Fernandes from CBC, and John Cullen. Assistant editor is Max Collins. Editor is Mitchell Stewart. Production support from Josh Lalongi at USG Audio. Veronica Simmons is our senior producer. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Tanya Springer is senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

JOHN CULLEN: Thanks for listening to Broomgate. If you want to hear the next episode right now, subscribe to our channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description.

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Transcript: Broomgate, Episode 1

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